Greetings from the freezing land of polar bears and manbearpigs, Finland.

First of all I want to congratulate AGDI team for the great work on Quest for Glory 2 and the King's Quest games! As a fellow game developer I understand the workload that's needed for such a task. About ten years ago I did a North and South remake with my programmer brother and we had a hard time finishing it (actually the ai, music, sound fx, and the minigames were left out because we were so burned out by the end of it). So special props for making QFG2 more complete than the original

From time to time I like to revisit (in some form or other) my childhood inspirations which were mostly done by a company with capital S in it's name. Quest for Glory series was by far my favourite but maybe it's the raised expectations that I can't finish any artwork related to it. Here's an example, unfinished painting of a scene in QFQ1 that I've been working on for some time:

process aka "the great struggle":

and two FINISHED paintings of the KQ series below which both have taken far less time:

(To be honest I'm not quite satisfied with this latter image, especially the background, but because it's the KQ series it doesn't bother me quite as much hehe.. go figure)

Again, thank you so much for the QFG2 remake and I hope you someday get to make a completely new installment of Quest for Glory with Lori and Corey

Wow, that artwork and the stuff in your portfolio is utterly amazing! It has this fantastic quality and detail level that game boxes used to have in the 1980's. Really impressive stuff. Perhaps you should have done some QFG2 artwork to enter into the contest we currently have running.

Out of curiosity, how long does it take you to complete such a detailed piece of artwork like that QFG one? Do you do this kind of artwork for a living, commission it privately, or is it just a hobby?

It takes around 10-20 hours to get to that kind of detail as in the QFG painting. One or two hours goes easily into splitting the image into manageable layers: Foreground, middleground, background, characters and weapons all on separate layers for easier manipulation. You can do some cool stuff when you divide it well and combine the results in 3d software. Here's an example (it's the Battle in Snow painting from my website): Warning blood! http://www.timovihola.com/gallery3/BattleInSnow3d.avi Warning blood!

The time I spend on each painting depends on many factors, the biggest being "How well was it planned". If you plan well you can decrease the completion considerably. It was Craig Mullins (http://www.goodbrush.com) who said that you should think first for 45 minutes, and then paint for 15 minutes and you get better painting than just painting for an hour. Heavy planning does take some joy out of it so I tend to do both.. it's relaxing to just draw something straight away. When you come back to it years later and try to turn it into a painting it will drive you insane with all the mistakes

Other factors include familiarity with the subject matter and as I mentioned above how much do you care the subject affects it also. New things require research which can take several hours.

I'm a co-owner of a small game company http://www.mountainsheep.net where I mostly do game design and 3d modeling so I like do these pieces to keep my 2d skills sharp and have some fun.

The pictures look like the graham in the SMS port of King's Quest. It's fun looking at the inner workings of the Hero's Quest one. Tiny details like the sword going up and down, how much light must fall into the frost giant, and the mountains appearing and disappearing. In some aspects I enjoy more the unfinished version, which is something that always happens to me, and to any people I've shown my own work-in-process sketches. That's quite frustrating, actually. Hehe.

"The Hero was seen outside of Shapeir with a mystery woman."My submission for the QFG2 art competition, more cartoony style this time:

I had this idea many days ago but was short on time and it wasn't because of too much work... it was due to buying Fable 2 last Monday, I curse that day! (as a sidenote Fable 2's engine would be great for an adventure game, it has one very beautiful medieval city) Not too happy about the foreground and some other elements in that painting, I used a new method for the clouds which I think worked ok. Also I wanted to put a moon somewhere behind the city towers but I've got too many of those in my other paintings already hehe

Thanks Erpy!

Thank you MusicallyInspired and Gronagor! Look above for a desert scene.

JonWW: They're both from the same 8-bit era so maybe they're related somehow

DrJones: Wow, there was a console version?

MusicallyInspired: Yeah, I remember that game - Unfortunately like King's Quest VII the beautiful graphics were somewhat killed by the 256 color dither. 640x400 and above resolutions need bigger palette, as a great example a Vampyre Story looks stunning.

Blackthorne519: Because it's my favourite part of the series it needs to be spot on, it's taken longer to paint than these other pictures

I thought it would be of interest for some people to see how it progresses to a final painting, I'm not even sure myself how it will look then. (I'm thinking about going for even more cartoony look than that QFG2 piece, with very simple shading and texture heavy surfaces this time)

Those Look so Good. Ohhh I am so jealous of people who can paint! I also admire your dedication, I don't think I'd be able to commit myself to one picture for so long. Although that's probably why I never finish anything...

Lady Pyro: One of my favourite quotes goes something like "everyone has 10 000 bad drawings in them, you just have to get them out first." It's mostly about mileage, I know many artists who are much faster and produce far better work. From what I've experienced doing 10-20 hour pieces mostly helps discipline (and of course portfolio), sketches and quick drawings are better for overall learning.

Solarkid:Thanks for the compliments!

Pattern of the brickwall: (the hardest thing to decide so far because there's so many bricks in the scene that it will affect the look a lot)

PS. fixed the spelling, all these years I've thought it was Conquest not Conquests. "Old habits die hard" I guess

Amazing man, absolutely fantastic!!! My favorite is still the QFG1 scene, I just love the detail and the humanity of the scene. It really seems to me that Brauggi and the the hero are truly regarding each other, I can imagine what must be going through the hero's mind at the sight of that darkened figure. Truly fantastic my friend.

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